Juvenile Detention

I work in a facility that houses juveniles. They are in this detention center while they wait for the outcome of their juvenile criminal case. I have existed in this realm of despair and hopelessness for almost five years. I teach language arts. I really want to teach the language of hope, but I fail at it horribly. In the classroom I offer from tired lips as much light as I can. However the light is sometimes smothered by the darkness that encompasses my young students.

Anger bubbles under young skin. It almost scorches to the bone. The heat of malcontent radiates and touches others, who become victims of unbridled anger. Anger at a community that cares nothing about their life. A useless poverty diseased thing that deserves to die. No mother or father. Exists all alone in the world as the ones responsible for love and compassion abandons them to the streets of a run down “HOOD” . Substandard education doesn’t fill the void but only makes it larger. We wonder how to educate past the pain.

The pain I feel for my students consumes me. I am an African American male. The majority of the children I see look like me. I see the pain and lack of hope sitting like a gremlin in the back of their eyes. It stares back at me and offers up a bitter laugh. It mocks me as I try to open their consciousness to the possibility of something better. I want to make it better for them. I want to take the guns out of their hands. Take the youngsters off the streets and offer faith it will become better. Its almost palpable the despair. It hangs in the air of this place. A dirty fog that offers nothing but more of the same-hopelessness

We wonder how to educate past the pain.

When I speak to my students, I want to educate from a point of history. To lay a seed of thought is what I want to accomplish in my classroom. A seed that blooms into the realization you are running back to the very chains which were removed from you centuries ago. Voluntarily you give freedom away.

To be free is a privilege that must be protected and valued because it costs others, Caucasian and African American, their very lives.

Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and countless others sacrificed their lives and shed blood for the freedoms enjoyed by so many African Americans in our country today.

However, these sacrifices offer me hope still. Each day I arrive at work hope travels with me. I have my days when my soul sits low and my heart aches for better in my students communities and in the larger world we live in. If we save these lost children and bring them about to a new idea of self worth and confidence our juvenile crime will decline. So I leave you with hope that our children, yes our children, can do better and improve their lives for the better and the greater good. Thanks for reading.